Signs that Germans are waking up to the reality of Islam

The English-language version of Der Spiegel reports:

The planned construction of over 180 mosques in Germany is mobilizing right-wing xenophobes but also an increasing number of leftist critics. They fear the Muslim places of worship will facilitate the establishment of a completely parallel society….

“Where this kind of gaudy Middle Eastern building goes up, with a dome and minarets, the next thing will be an application to the authorities for permission to do the call to prayer,” a passage on the Pro Germany Web site reads. It’s visions like this that are leading more and more Germans to see the construction of mosques as the expression of a “kind of land grab,” observes Claus Leggewie, a political science professor at the University of Giessen in the western state of Hesse.

This impression is aggravated not only by right-wing agitators but also, according to Leggewie, by careless or sometimes even deliberately provocative statements by Muslim builders. Many seem to think like Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In words spoken in 1997, Erdogan made mosque construction seem like part of a strategy of Islamization: “The minarets are our lances, the domes our helmets, the believers our army.”

The names of some of the newly built mosques aren’t exactly in harmony with the reassuring “Islam is peace” slogan. Religious scholar Ursula Spuler-Stegemann at Germany’s University of Marburg, among others, criticizes the fact that mosques are named after warlords like Fatih Sultan Mehmet, conqueror of Constantinople. “That can only be an agenda,” she believes. “These Muslims don’t just want to show their presence here, but also to strengthen and expand it.”

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Katya writes:

The full, correct rendition of Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan’s quotation of a Turkish saying is:

“The minarets are our bayonets, the domes our helmets, the mosques our barracks, the believers our soldiers.”

Too bad Der Spiegel left out the incriminating bit about mosques since, historically, mosques functioned not only as barracks and ammunition storage depots but also as places where sharia law was pronounced and enacted, treaties signed, military strategy decided and declarations of the Islamic state made, all of which fits in very well with the awakening German realism about Islam as a political ideology rather than, erroneously, a form of worship.

How superbly ironic that a people notorious for the concept of Lebensraum as a justification for their own imperialist pretentions should be the ones to nail Islam—correctly—as a universal “land grab.”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 22, 2008 07:06 PM | Send